Google Glass wasn’t built in a day, but the first prototype was

Google’s X labs are all about trying incredible new things, and the big thing that team is known for right now is the upcoming Google Glass. While it took the team quite a while to even reach the pre-production stage they are at now, the first concept was assembled on Day 1.

As the Head of Experience for Google’s special projects, Tom Chi is uniquely suited to give a TED talk on rapid prototyping. His experiences in taking out of the box concepts and turning them into real, usable things creates a unique perspective on how to learn by doing. We know from interviews with Google co-founder Sergey Brin that even after Glass was shown off on stage at Google IO last year the team was constantly tweaking the hardware and software, such that there was a time where no two Glass headsets were completely alike.

It’s not even a guarantee that Google’s developer kit, due to start shipping to members of the Glass Explorers program within the next month, will be the same thing that hits shelves as a consumer product at the end of the year. How does something like this start? According to Tom Chi, it starts with a clothes hanger.

The very first prototype for Glass was designed just to see what it would be like to have your digital world laid over your physical one, in order to answer some basic questions about how useful it would be to see these kinds of experiences. If all you’re trying to do is lay a computer screen over the real world, you can do that with a pico projector and a binder transparency. After you have a stable-ish design for that, all you need to do is find a way to hang it from your body so the new display lines up with your vision.

This first prototype, consisting of a netbook and a really flimsy and awkward looking display, is all that was needed to confirm that this general experience had merit. It was worth pursuing beyond this point, which is all that was necessary at the time.

Obviously, Google Glass has grown up quite a bit since that first prototype. The evolution from netbook driven awkwardness to the slender piece of technology that sits just above your right eye is a process that required many more prototypes, all with the purpose of answering the new questions that were asked along the way. As a result, the project has received an overwhelming volume of support and enough excitement to keep those eager about the product interested for over a year now.